Published June 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

JWST/NIRCam Coronagraphic Search for Hidden Planets in the HD 163296 Protoplanetary Disk

  • 1. ROR icon California State University, Northridge
  • 2. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 3. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 4. ROR icon Columbia University
  • 5. ROR icon Rice University
  • 6. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 7. ROR icon University of Chile
  • 8. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 9. ROR icon Johns Hopkins University
  • 10. ROR icon University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Abstract

HD 163296 is a Herbig Ae/Be star with multiple signposts of ongoing planet formation on its disk, such as prominent rings and gaps, as well as kinematic features as identified by previous Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations. We carried out JWST/NIRCam coronagraphic imaging using the F410M and F200W NIRCam filters, with the goal of detecting the emission from the putative young planets in this system. Our F410M observations did not detect the putative planets at the predicted locations of the ALMA velocity kinks, but they did detect a point-like source candidate at a separation of ≈0.′′⁡75 and a position angle of ≈231.∘⁡4 that is unlikely a background star because of the measured flux in the F410M filter and the detection limit in the F200W filter. These data achieved unprecedented contrast levels at ∼4 μm at stellocentric separations ρ≳0.′′⁡8. This allowed us to derive stringent constraints at the outer velocity kink (ΔF410M = 15.2 mag) on the mass of the putative planet with or without a circumplanetary disk, and considering different possible initial entropies for the planet.

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referee for their constructive comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper. We would also like to thank Vanessa Bailey and Cornelis Dullemond for contributing to the JWST proposal (ID: GO 2540; PI: Luca Ricci) that is the key of this work. We are grateful to Jorge Llop-Sayson for helping with synthetic RDI reduction, William Balmer for useful comments on the spaceKLIP steps, Felipe Alarcon for providing model extinction maps of the HD 163296 disk with the NIRCam filters, Gabriele Cugno for comprehensive discussions about JWST data, and Maxwell Millar-Blanchaer for suggestive comments on the disk forward modeling.

This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program GO 2540. The specific observations analyzed can be accessed via 10.17909/j87q-jf82. Part of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. We wish to acknowledge the critical importance of the current and recent Maunakea Observatories day crew, technicians, telescope operators, computer support, and office staff employees, especially during the challenging times presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their expertize, ingenuity, and dedication are indispensable to the continued successful operation of these observatories. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC,  https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. This publication makes use of VOSA, developed under the Spanish Virtual Observatory (https://svo.cab.inta-csic.es) project funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ through grant PID2020-112949GB-I00. VOSA has been partially updated by using funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement no. 776403 (EXOPLANETS-A).

The authors acknowledge support for program JWST-GO 2540 provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). A.I. acknowledges support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. 80NSSC18K0828. S.Z. acknowledges support by NASA through NASA Hubble Fellowship grant no. HST-HF2-51568 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. L.P. gratefully acknowledges support by the ANID BASAL project FB210003 and ANID FONDECYT Regular 1221442.

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2503.20132 (arXiv)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.17909/j87q-jf82 (DOI)

Funding

Space Telescope Science Institute
JWST-GO 2540
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NAS 5-03127
W. M. Keck Foundation
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
PID2020-112949GB-I00
European Research Council
776403
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NM0018D0004
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
80NSSC18K0828
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA Hubble Fellowship HST-HF2-51568
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NAS5-26555
Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo
FB210003
Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico
1221442

Dates

Accepted
2025-03-25
Available
2025-05-02
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Astronomy Department, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published